Fear of Russia ran high even after the Bolshevik
revolution of 1917, which spawned a communist party in America.

The "red scare" of 1919-1920 resulted in a
nationwide crusade against those whose Americanism was suspect. Attorney
General A. Mitchell Palmer was chosen to round up immigrants who were in
question.

In 1919-1920, a number of states passed criminal
syndicalism laws that made the advocacy of violence to secure social change
unlawful. Traditional American ideals of free speech were restricted.

Antiredism and antiforeignism were reflected
in the criminal case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The
two men were convicted in 1921 of the murder of a Massachusetts paymaster
and his guard. Although given a trial, the jury and judge were prejudiced
against the men because they were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft
dodgers. Despite criticism from liberals and radicals all over the world, the
men were electrocuted in 1927.

Hooded Hoodlums of the KKK

The Ku Klux Klan (Knights of the Invisible Empire)
grew quickly in the early 1920s. The Klan was antiforeign, anti-Catholic,
anti-black, anti-Jewish, antipacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist,
antievolutionist, antibootlegger, antigambling, antiadultery, and anti-birth
control. It was pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-"native" American, and pro-Protestant.

The Klan spread rapidly, especially in the Midwest and the
South, claiming 5 million members.

It collapsed in the late 1920s after a congressional investigation exposed the internal embezzling by Klan officials.

The KKK was an alarming manifestation of the intolerance
and prejudice plaguing people anxious about the dizzying pace of social change
in the 1920s.

Stemming the Foreign Blood

Isolationist Americans of the 1920s felt they had no use
for immigrants. The "New Immigration" of the 1920s caused Congress to
pass the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, restricting newcomers from Europe
in any given year to a definite quota, which was at 3% of the people of their
nationality who had been living in the United States in 1910.

The Immigration Act of 1924 replaced the Quota Act
of 1921, cutting quotas for foreigners from 3% to 2%. Different countries were
only allowed to send an allotted number of its citizens to America every year.
Japanese were outright banned from coming to America. Canadians and Latin
Americans, whose proximity made them easy to attract for jobs when times were
good and just as easy to send back home when times were not, were exempt from
the act.

The quota system caused immigration to dwindle.

The Immigration Act of 1924 marked the end of an era of
unrestricted immigration to the United States. Many of the most recent arrivals
lived in isolated enclaves with their own houses of worship, newspapers, and
theaters.

The Prohibition "Experiment"

The 18th Amendment, passed in 1919,
banned alcohol. Prohibition, supported by churches and women, was one
the last peculiar spasms of the progressive reform movement. It was popular in
the South, where white southerners were eager to keep stimulants out of the
hands of blacks, and in the West, where alcohol was associated with crime and
corruption.

Prohibitionists were na´ve in that Federal authorities had
never been able to enforce a law where the majority of the people were hostile
to it. Prohibition might have started off better if there had been a larger
number of enforcement officials.

The large profits of illegal alcohol led to bribery of
police. Violent wars broke out in the big cities between rival gangs, who
sought control of the booze market.

Chicago was the most spectacular example of lawlessness.
"Scarface" Al Capone, a murderous booze distributor, began 6 years of
gang warfare that generated millions of dollars. Capone was eventually tried
and convicted of income-tax evasion and sent to prison for 11 years.

Gangsters began to move into other profitable and illicit
activities: prostitution, gambling, narcotics, and kidnapping for ransom.

After the son of Charles A. Lindbergh was kidnapped
for ransom and murdered, Congress passed the Lindbergh Law in 1932,
making interstate abduction in certain circumstances a death-penalty offense.

Monkey Business in Tennessee

Education made great strides in the 1920s.
Professor John Dewey set forth the principles of "learning by doing" that
formed the foundation of so-called progressive education. He believed that
"education for life" should be a primary goal of the teacher.

Science and better health care also resulted out of the
1920s.

Fundamentalists, old-time religionists, claimed that
the teaching of Darwinismevolution was destroying faith in God
and the Bible, while contributing to the moral breakdown of youth.

In 1925, John T. Scopes was indicted in
Tennessee for teaching evolution. At the "Monkey Trial," Scopes was
defended by Clarence Darrow, while former presidential candidate
William Jennings Bryan prosecuted him. Scopes was found guilty and fined
$100.

Bruce Barton founded advertising which sought
to make Americans want more and more.

Sports became a big business in the consumer economy
of the 1920s.

Buying in credit was another new feature of the
postwar economy. Prosperity thus accumulated an overhanging cloud of debt, and
the economy became increasingly vulnerable to disruptions of the credit
structure.

Putting America on Rubber Tires

The automobile industrial started an industrial revolution
in the 1920s. It yielded a new industrial system based on assembly-line methods
and mass-production techniques. Detroit became the motorcar capital of the
world.

Henry Ford, father of the assembly line, created the
Model T and erected an immense personal empire on the cornerstone of his
mechanical genius. By 1930, the number of Model Ts in the nation had reached 20
million.

The Advent of the Gasoline Age

The automobileindustry exploded, creating
millions of jobs and supporting industries. America's standard of living rose
sharply, and new industries flourished while old ones dwindled. The petroleum
business experienced an explosive development and the railroad industry was hard
hit by the competition of automobiles.

The automobile freed up women from their dependence on men,
and isolation among the sections was broken down. It was responsible for
thousands of deaths, while at the same time bringing more convenience, pleasure,
and excitement into more people's lives.

Humans Develop Wings

Gasoline engines provided the power that enabled humans to
fly. On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made their
first flight, lasting 12 seconds and 120 feet.

After the success of airplanes in WWI, private companies
began to operate passenger airlines with airmail contracts.

Charles A. Lindberg became the first man to fly solo
across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. His flight energized and gave a
strong boost to the new aviation industry.

The Radio Revolution

Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless telegraphy (the
telegraph) in the 1890s.

In the 1920s, the first voice-carrying radio broadcasts
reached audiences. While automobiles were luring Americans away from the home,
the radio was luring them back. Educationally and culturally, the radio also
made a significant contribution.

Hollywood's Filmland Fantasies

As early as the 1890s, the motion picture, invented
by Thomas A. Edison, had gained some popularity. The true birth of
motion picture came in 1903 with the release of the first story sequence:
The Great Train Robbery. Hollywood became the movie capital of the world.

Motion picture was used extensively in WWI as anti-German
propaganda.

Much of the diversity of the immigrants' cultures was lost,
but the standardization of tastes and of language hastened entry into the
American mainstream-and set the stage for the emergence of a working-class
political coalition that would overcome the divisive ethnic differences of the
past.

The Dynamic Decade

In the 1920s, the majority of Americans had shifted from
rural areas to urban (city) areas.

Women continued to find jobs in the cities. Margaret
Sanger led a birth-control movement. Alice Paul formed the
National Women's Party in 1923 to campaign for an Equal Rights
Amendment to the Constitution.

The Fundamentalists lost ground to the Modernists
who believed that God was a "good guy" and the universe was a friendly place.

The 1920s witnessed an explosion in sex appeal in America.
Young women, "flappers," rolled their stockings, taped their breasts
flat, and roughed their cheeks. Women began to wear one-piece bathing suits.

Dr. Sigmund Freud writings justified this new sexual
frankness by arguing that sexual repression was responsible for a variety of
nervous and emotional ills.

Jazz thrived in the era of the 1920s.

Racial pride blossomed in the northern black communities.
Marcus Garvey founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
to promote the resettlement of blacks in Africa. In the United States, the UNIA
also sponsored stores and other businesses to keep blacks' dollars in black
pockets.

Cultural Liberation

In the decade after WWI, a new generation of writers
emerged. They gave American literature new life, imaginativeness, and artistic
quality.

H.L. Mencken attacked marriage, patriotism,
democracy, and prohibition in his monthly American Mercury.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of
Paradise in 1920 and The Great Gatsby in 1925.

Earnest Hemingway was among the writers most
affected by the war. He responded to propaganda and the overblown appeal to
patriotism. He wrote of disillusioned, spiritually numb American expatriates in
Europe in The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922).

Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio (1919).

Architecture also became popular as materialism and
functionalism increased.

Wall Street's Big Bull Market

In the 1920s, the stockmarket became
increasingly popular.

In Washington, little was done to curtail money
management.

In 1921, the Republican Congress created the
Bureau of the Budget in order to assist the president in preparing estimates
of receipts and expenditures for submission to Congress as the annual budget.
It was designed to prevent haphazardly extravagant appropriations.

Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's belief was that
taxes forced the rich to invest in tax-exempt securities rather than in the
factories that provided prosperous payrolls. Mellon helped create a series of
tax reductions from 1921-1926 in order to help rich people.
Congress followed by abolishing the gift tax, reducing excise taxes, the surtax,
the income tax, and estate taxes. Mellon's policies shifted much of the tax
burden from the wealthy to the middle-income groups. Mellon reduced the
national debt by $10 billion.